A great quote, from a great post, from a great blog, “Knowing and Doing: Commas, Refactoring, and Learning to Program”.
Category Archives: Coding, Software Engineering, Computer Science
Recent Space-X on NPR highlights how little we read
A story is posted about a private company working to build the largest capacity lifter in service and what do a significant number of commentors fret about?
That the government is wasting its money on building it!
It is pretty clear that most of those who are commenting that way have not read (or worst – understood) the story, but the ‘private company’ part was highlighted in the summary.
Check it out – NPR.org (on Facebook): Plans For World’s Most Powerful Rocket Unveiled
Sad, huh?
But don’t you think there are multiple failures taking place exemplified here? And where do you feel they stem from?
How poor information design led to Waterfall
I just took part in a great 3 day training session with Uncle Bob Martin on TDD and healthy software design. One of the tidbits Bob shared was the history behind the Waterfall methodology that some of us older folks strained against until agile and lean methodologies started to get well known. Waterfall originated in a paper by Winston W. Royce, in which he describes the process… as a straw man to tear down! Unfortunately, the poor information design of the paper (it puts the summary tearing down the methodology on later pages instead of right up front) led those who read the nice graphics on leading pages to come away thinking they found the solution to their software engineering process needs.
Watch Glenn Vanderburg’s “Real Software Engineering” talk on Vimeo about this.
Real Software Engineering – Glenn Vanderburg from Engine Yard on Vimeo.
Awesome visualizations from the NYTimes and Guardian
Check out the terrific timeline visualization of protests in the Middle East. The navigation and elements surfaced simultaneously is informative and makes exploring fun.
The NYTimes engineering blog “Open” shares novel uses of its API, some of which are physical!
Yesterday Android Alliance launched in Philly
Yesterday folks interested in Android development got together at National Mechanics in CC Philly and had a few drinks with one another. The big takeaway for me from the first meeting is that there are many in the region involved in mobile development (including myself) and that a community here is ready to connect.
Kudos to Corey and Arpit for bringing this together. It was fun and I hope to learn much from everyone.
Join the Google Group and follow on on Twitter.
Additional links can be had from CIM Labs.
A new CMS to watch?
Armstrong is a new open source CMS in development, based upon Django, and funded by the Knight Foundation.
There is a recent piece about Armstrong posted at The Nieman Journalism Lab with a good thread questioning the need and the backing technology since other options exist. I think the more experimentation in this space the better because as Rafe Colburn has rightly said, “Content management is still an unsolved problem”. Rafe ruminates that, “For some reason, finding an adequate balance between usability, flexibility, and performance is nearly impossible.”, and it can seem that way if you are shooting at a fixed target. Anyone who has worked on a CMS project has felt this way. I certainly have from time to time. The trick is to have a solution that not only meets your needs, but can evolve as those targets shift, and educating those involved that it is a part of a larger ecosystem where evolution is a feature and not a bug.
Andrew Tait’s latest video – comparing every version of IE
YouTube: We are IE – Comparing every version of Internet Explorer:
From Andrew Tait.
How Google Tests Software
James Whittaker has been sharing the details on the Google Testing blog recently and it has been a fascinating series:
“How Google Tests Software – Part One”
Managing development flow to go faster
Three from Jon Moore (he doesn’t post that often, but when he does, they are must reads, so subscribe!):
Jon Moore: “Managing Software Development Flow”
Jon Moore: Intuitions about Software Development Flow
Jon Moore: How to Go Faster
And one from Aaron Held that is related on the “Measurement of Awesome”: “This is kind of like gravity. Science can only measure the effects of gravity but you can’t run without it. And running beats floating back and forth aimlessly any day”